by Rachel Caine
She slipped into a deep, gentle sleep. David sat back on his heels with a sigh and looked at the three of us. He focused on the shotgun, then Luis's face, and Luis cleared his throat and raised the shotgun to rest against his shoulder in a safe carry position.
"What happened?" Luis asked.
"The avatar, the empty one," David said. "Whoever is after us, they were using it to source the aetheric block around us. It--came after Jo. We had to be sure it wouldn't happen again."
"So you killed it," Rahel said. I couldn't tell, from the way she said it, whether that was praise or blame.
Perhaps David didn't know, either. He shook his head and settled against the wall, tense and fluid, eyes penny-bright. "Not me," he said. "Watch the lobby. They'll be coming soon enough, now that they know they can't cut us off from the aetheric any longer. You two should rest while you can." That last was directed at Luis and me.
"The avatar," I said. "It was an empty shell?"
"It was a Djinn once," he said. "You know him. Go and look."
I stared at him for a moment, frowning, and then nodded. I walked past Luis, who was now sitting again on the couch; he started to rise to go with me, but I gestured for him to stay.
This I needed to do for myself.
The body of the avatar lay limp on the wet floor tiles. Its eyes were open, but entirely dead black now. It was just flesh, real down to the circulatory system, and blood ran sluggishly down the tile crevices toward the drain, but it was leakage, not true bleeding. One had to be alive to bleed.
I crouched down, staring at his face. It seemed familiar, and I took each of the features individually, trying to place him. Djinn could, and did, change appearance, but for some reason once we settled on a human form, we didn't often shift out of it and into another. It became part of our self-image, I supposed. My memory was long, but human faces had never formed much of a meaning for me....
And then I knew.
He was one of my brothers, a True Djinn.
The memory came back to me, shockingly painful. His name was Xarus, and unlike me, he'd always been fascinated by humans. He'd walked in human flesh often, formed friendships, attachments. I'd always thought him peculiar, and weak.
Years ago, he'd been pulled apart on the aetheric--a natural accident, one of the few that could claim the life and soul of a Djinn. Had he not been trying to save others, humans, he could have saved himself, but he made the choice to destroy his immortal existence for the sake of a handful of fragile, temporary creatures.
And I had hated him for that. I'd hated the memory of him still more when I'd discovered that his flesh shell still lived and breathed. Jonathan, then the leader of the Djinn, had decreed that the flesh of Xarus, the avatar, be spared. I hadn't known why, but perhaps Jonathan had known something. He often did, annoyingly. He'd had a gift for foresight that had bettered anyone's, even Ashan's.
Why, now, did I feel Xarus's loss at last, seeing his lifeless body reduced to meat? Why did it matter?
I put my hand on his cheek. It felt like human flesh. It was human flesh, Xarus's flesh, crafted like mine from the deepest instincts, the desires none of us ever acknowledged to be mortal, to know what their brief and bright lives were like...
It was the last of something that had been born immortal, and now it was gone.
I sat in the dark silence, with his blood crawling slowly toward the drain, and I grieved in ways that I never had, for one of my own lost. I'd felt anger before; I'd felt betrayal, and sometimes, loss.
But never emptiness. Never the raw knowledge of caring in the way that humans cared for each other, and missed each other.
And the ironic thing was that he'd been gone for almost a thousand years, and I'd never really liked him in the first place.
When I returned to the outer room, Luis was asleep. So was Joanne. David and I said nothing to each other, but he knew, and in a way, that eased my pain a little; I had more in common with him than I'd ever fully realized. More in common with all of them.
David was right. I needed to rest.
I couldn't sleep.
Instead of resting, although I was tired, I found myself pacing in the narrow confines of the common room as Luis and Joanne sprawled and dreamed on the couches. There was something nagging at me, something beyond my grief and worry, or even the anticipation of a fight to come. There was something we had missed. Were missing. It ticked in the back of my mind like a bomb, and as the humans slept, as David and Rahel kept a silent and vigilant watch, I struggled to understand what it was that bothered me so much....
Joanne woke, and David moved to speak with her in a low voice. She was upset; bad dreams, perhaps. I paid no attention. I admired her survival skills, but not her emotional instability.
"We should go," I said to Rahel, who was still silent and vigilant at her post. Unlike a human, she didn't feel the need to fidget, shift, relax, or even look away--the Djinn version of a motion sensor. "There's no need to linger here now. We can defend ourselves adequately, if pressed, now that we can reach the aetheric."
"Can we?" She smiled a cynical little smile, and lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug. "Look at her in Oversight and tell me what you think then."
By her she meant, presumably, Joanne. I leaned against the wall next to Rahel and shifted my eyes into the aetheric spectrum, and saw what she had seen... what David must have seen as well. Joanne was not an especially powerful Earth Warden, able to fight the effects of radiation as part of her natural gifts; Weather Wardens had no such protections, and she'd taken the very worst of the beating down in that pit.
She was saturated with it, cells cooking and dying from the inside out, as if she'd been trapped in an invisible microwave.
"If she and her child are to live," Rahel said, "then David needs time to heal her. It won't be easy, and it's beyond the capacity of Earth Wardens. So we stay. She has to rest." This time, just for a split second, her eyes veered from their focus to rest on me, a flash of gold and warmth. "And you, mistress, ought to rest as well. You're not as strong as you believe."
I settled into a chair then, unwillingly. I don't need rest, I thought, but as soon as I released my iron hold on my body, it begged to disagree with aches blooming in every muscle. David's whispering in the Djinn language was a soothing litany meant for Joanne, but it lulled me as well, into an exhausted tumble into the dark.
At the last second, what Rahel had said struck me, rather forcefully. If she and her child are to live...
Joanne Baldwin was pregnant, and it must have been David's child--the child of a Djinn. And somehow, I hadn't seen it.
I turned my gaze on her in Oversight, and yes, there it was, the clear though subtle signs of life stirring inside her--curiously, not Djinn life, but something more tethered to the human world. David's child, but human in form and power.
Joanne and David had something more to fight for, it seemed, than just the world in general. The way that Luis--and yes, me--found strength in our love for Isabel.
David saw me watching them, and looked up. I smiled, just a little, and he returned it. "You think I'm mad, don't you?" he asked.
I shrugged. "Perhaps," I said. "And perhaps I'm not mad enough. But I believe that I'm learning."
Waking up came with a surge of adrenaline and terror, and I didn't know why. It was utterly silent. Nothing had changed in the room, except that David had fallen silent. I opened my eyes and saw Rahel at the window, looking out, and in the next second I saw her take a step back and allow the blinds to fall closed.
She turned to David, who looked up. They both nodded.
"Wake him," Rahel said to me, and pointed to Luis, who was blissfully snoring on the couch. "We need everyone now."
I shook Luis awake and endured his muttering about the lack of coffee, and we were joining hands to assess the situation on the aetheric when the first attack came.
Something wild and very angry slammed headlong into the sealed door. I was surprised that the cheap barri
er held; it flexed against the impact, and a thin crack formed down the middle. "Brace it," I said, and Luis nodded, throwing our combined Earth power into the wood to stiffen it to a packed-steel density. Another, stronger power overlaid ours.
Joanne was awake and on her feet now, and despite the sudden emergency, she looked almost herself again--tall, strong, confident, with a smile curving her full lips and a light in her eyes. She loved battle almost as much as I did, I thought. That was... unique, in a Warden. "Time to get down to business," she said. "Let's do this."
Rahel evidently did not think our combined talents were enough, as she pushed a massive piece of furniture against it. "It will not hold," she said. "We should leave now, quickly. Is there a back door?"
"There's company waiting for us there as well," David said. "We're surrounded."
"Did you not think to warn us of that?" I snapped. "I told you we should have run last night!"
"It wasn't an option," David replied flatly. "We can get out of this. It's just going to take a little creativity."
Whatever was on the other side of the door hit with such violence that the barrier, even strengthened by three Wardens and a Djinn, bowed inward, almost ripping free of the wall in which it was anchored.
"What the hell is out there?" Luis blurted. Rahel seemed to find the question amusing.
"I don't think it would do your sanity any good to know. We must go up, not out. Nothing waiting out there strikes me as good at climbing, but they are very good at battering holes in things."
It was David who ripped an opening in the roof above; the hotel's guest room tower was seven stories tall, but at this end, the building was a simple one-story affair. Only fifteen feet, straight up.
David, of course, merely flexed his legs and easily made the jump upward. I grabbed my backpack and made sure it was securely against me, then began to think about how the rest of us were to get up to safety.
"Damn," Luis said. "Forgot my jet pack. Knew I should have packed that." I made a cradle of fingers and leaned down. He raised his eyebrows. "You're kidding, right?"
"Do I seem to be?"
"Hardly ever, chica," he said. He put his booted foot in my cupped hands, and I pulled Earth power to saturate my muscles as I lifted him, straight up. It hurt, that particular enrichment of the very limited capabilities of my human body; I felt the shriek burn its way out of my mouth without my consent, but the effort worked. I threw him high enough that David could grab his arm and lift him onto the surface of the roof.
But I also knew I wouldn't be able to do that for myself. Not effectively. Which left...
Rahel.
I hardly heard David ordering her to bring me; it was unnecessary that he do so, because after all, I held her bottle. I could have done it just as easily. Only I knew that doing so would open up a million subtle avenues of resistance to her, as irresistible to her as catnip, even now. It was a risk not worth taking, as the door protecting us continued to steadily break under the mindless, violent assault.
"Sistah," Rahel said. I stared back at her, watching that shark's smile on her face. There was hate in it, and I understood it very well. I'd always had nothing but contempt for the New Djinn; I'd treated them as not just second class, but other--a mongrel breed of human and Djinn, unworthy.
And she hated me for that, and for enslaving her and so many others, even if it had to be done to save them. No doubt she had other grudges; we all did, we immortals with our endlessly long memories. I had few friends even among the True Djinn, and none among her kind.
Joanne asked, perhaps jokingly, if she had to make it an order for Rahel to save me... and Rahel almost laughed, knowing as well as I did that an order from Joanne carried even less weight than one from me. "No need," Rahel replied. "And no time. I'll cleanse myself of her contamination later."
Before I could respond, she had seized me, and jumped, and in almost the same motion, pushed me away. I landed on the roof, disoriented and off balance, and tumbled. I felt the crashing impact of the backpack hitting the hard surface and rolled back to my feet, rage a comforting warmth inside me, and spun to face her again as the cold desert breeze stirred my hair.
Rahel grinned, and made a little come on gesture. Her bottle had not been smashed, though others certainly had been.
No time for settling our scores now, or even for taking stock of what we'd just lost. Joanne, Weather Warden and in firm command of the winds, levitated easily up through the hole, while Rahel, at David's terse order, began repairing the rip through which we'd come. Below, the sound of destruction was increasing. Whatever was below, it was angry.
I ventured to the edge of the roof and looked down. Luis joined me, took one look, and quickly stepped back. "Okay, I don't really want to ask, but... what the hell is that?"
"It's a chimera, a forced merger of several animal forms. Bear, mountain lion, scorpion." I said it easily enough; identification was automatic, and he could have done it as well, if he'd been able to overcome his instinctive nausea and horror at what we were seeing. As a human, it was disconcerting enough, but as an Earth Warden, feeling the utter vileness of what had been done... That was what drove him back, sent him reeling and gagging.
And it was what I was fighting, silently, as well.
There were at least four of the chimera in view now; one had a bear's head clumsily balanced atop a mountain lion's strong, sinuous body, but there were extra, armored legs erupting from the lion's sides, and a segmented tail with a vicious stinger curving out from the back and overhead. Nauseating and fierce, and mad.
"This isn't the Mother," Joanne said. She was standing with me, looking over, holding her long, dark hair back as the breeze batted at us. She was pale and grim, but not as revolted as Luis was, or I felt. "It can't be her doing this."
And it wasn't. I'd worried at that last night, paced, tried to shake sense out of what the avatar had been doing... and now, finally, it clicked together. This was what the avatar had been doing, under the cover of darkness, shielded from the eyes of the Djinn and even from the Mother. No, not the avatar; the avatar was only a flesh puppet, a conduit for another's power. And I knew now, looking at these things, who had wielded that power.
"It's Pearl," I said. "She's after me."
Joanne laughed humorlessly. "Wow. It's all about you, isn't it?"
"This time, I believe it is--"
"Watch it," she warned, and pulled me a step back. There were wolves circling below, too, weaving around the chimeras; they were leaping up, trying to make the jump to where we were. So far, they were unable to do so, but there was no reason to encourage them.
"Yeah, that's not the worst. Heads up," Luis said, and pointed up. I moved my head back, and saw a black circle of birds above us, wheeling in the warming air. The first rays of dawn gilded their wings with gold. "We need a shield, now!" He'd sensed something that I'd missed, but I saw it now... the birds shifted, no longer circling, but dropping.
Heading straight for us. I reached out and diverted some of the birds, but it was difficult; they were maddened, like the chimera below, driven beyond their own instincts by the torment that Pearl had inflicted on them. Death would be, for them, merciful.
But I couldn't destroy them. Birds were, for me, the most beautiful of nature's creatures... free and fierce. I felt Joanne raise a shield of hardened air above us, and flinched as the first of the birds hit. She'd tried to make it less apt to be fatal, but Pearl's attack drove them mercilessly into the barrier, waves of them, snapping their fragile bones, painting the sky with their blood.
Tears welled in my eyes at the sight. This was for my benefit, mine alone; Pearl knew me, and she knew what would hurt me. These creatures were dying for no better purpose than to anger me.
The mesmerizing horror of the suicidal assault had distracted us from the other issues, but luckily David and Rahel had been on guard; now I heard the rip of metal and saw David throwing a large metal dish toward the edge of the roof, where one of the chimeras h
ad clawed its way up. It knocked that one over, but the next one's venomous stinger tail was already visible in another corner.
"Great," Luis said, resigned. "They climb. Yeah, of course they do, because it'd be too fucking easy if they'd stay on the ground." He readied a fireball in his hands, the burning plasma lighting up his face from below and making dark hollows of his eyes. He wasn't the only one turning to fire; Joanne also had pulled on that power, and as I glanced her way I saw her throw with a strong pitcher's follow-through.
Her fireball exploded against the chimera as it landed on the roof and roared at us in an eerie mix of bear and lion... and then shrieked in a high, chittering voice as the fireball set it aflame. Joanne threw an airburst against it, blowing it in a burning arc off the corner of the roof, screaming all the way.
The screaming continued, and I knew without looking that the other creatures had attacked it. Pearl's nature was nothing if not savage.
"More are coming," Rahel said. "I suggest you plan an escape." She didn't seem her normally remote self just now; it seemed the situation was dire enough that she actually cared. That was... alarming. Escape seemed a remote possibility. We had no car now, and my motorcycle--providing it had survived the night--wouldn't be any defense against the kind of creatures Pearl had at her disposal; she was summoning more birds for another suicidal strike, and the chimeras out there could easily rip us apart. I had no idea how fast they could run, and I wasn't tempted to find out.